First, vital facts and figures.
Number of East Germans migrating to West Germany each day: 3,000. Cost of a
piece of Berlin Wall bought at Brandenburg
Gate: 6DM. (Cost of my own piece: nothing – I reached in and grabbed
it.) Height of Berlin Film Festival chief Moritz de Hadeln: 6 foot 1. Number of
years in office: 10. Total number of years festival has operated: 40.

From this we can see that the
Berlin Filmfestspiele began
a new era in 1990– hallelujah! – and
the only thing that hasn't changed is the boss's height.

Two important things have changed:
1) The German Democratic Republic has leaned over its wall and said,
"Please, sir, can we give our country back?" 2) There has been a
galloping increase in America/Hollywood's presence in the Main Competition –
seven out of 30 films from the USA. This was too much for one festival
committee member, German helmerHelma Sanders-Brahms,
who stormed out of a pre-festival selection meeting and later slagged off fest
chief de Hadeln for being too kind to Tinseltown.

But hold on, Miss S-B. Nothing
is simple in the age of musical powerblocs. As
countries and cultures change places and dance, when is a Hollywood film a
Hollywood film? At Berlin only two of the competing U.S. movies were directed
by Americans. Elsewhere the Starred-and-Striped limos purring in from Tegel Airport boasted an
Australian (Bruce Beresford), two
Brits (KarelReisz, Roland Joffé),
a German (Volker Schlöndorff), and a Franco-Greek (Costa-Gavras).

The age may dawn – let it be soon,
pray God – when movie festivals function without reference to national
signatures. (Or even to Helma Sanders-Brahms.)
Certainly Berlin has led this movement throughout the Eighties. As a Western
festival islanded in an Eastern landmass, it has experienced too many loony
political furors – as when the Russians flounced out over The Deer Hunter ten
years ago, or when the entire jury resigned over Germany's anti-Vietnam film OK
20 years ago – not to have begun to see the silly side of it. Today it's
hands across the divide, not fists, and about time, too.

The pre-millennial vogue in
Europe is for disowning nationhood and hugging federalism. Down side: an
increase in "Euro-puddings," those nightmare pix in which, say, a
Dutch actor mouths English dialogue in an Italian-directed film based on a
Paris-set novel by an Austrian author. (It couldn't happen? Try Olmi's Legend
of the Holy Drinker.) Upside:
a sense that every other country's problems touch our own. The two best films
at Berlin each combined a political case-history specific to its nation with
a dramatic resonance that gave the work an international passport.

• AlexandroAgresti'sSecret
Wedding(BodaSecreta).
Any movie that opens with a nude man stumbling out of a dark tunnel
towards "rebirth" in the Buenos Aires streets looks as if it has a
bad case of Freudian Cheek. But this fable of a returning "desaparecedo,"
seeking the love of a lost girlfriend in the small town he hasn't visited for
13 years, can take sweepstake money
now as the best Latin American movie of the Nineties.(Only 3,500 viewing days
to go – place your bets.)

Agresti
wrote, directed, and lensed the picture, which hums
with visual and comic invention. Crane shots sweep around our dumpy,
mustachioed hero as he moves through a conspiracy of non-recognition in his
hometown. The priest thinks he's an agent of Satan. The town officials think
he's from the KGB ("How are things, Tovarich?" they test him
with). And the girlfriend, who's faithfully pined for him since his arrest by
the junta, doesn't even know him – even though the photo of him in her
bedroom is identical to the man today.

The film is Gogol'sThe Inspector General flapjacked into a
Nineties comic anomie. For Agresti, political
disappearance in banana dictatorships is something that even reappearance
can't cure. Re-exposed to daylight, the detainee gropes to rediscover his
identity. But he finds a world rewritten by religion and propaganda, a world
in which even innocent bystanders like the girlfriend have been brainwashed
to present blind and ostracizing eyes to the dissident.

Visually the film is dazzling.
The baroque swoops and cranes, the vertiginous low and high angles, create a
lens-language to match Latin literature's "magic realism." (What a
movie Agresti would make of 100 Years of
Solitude.) Secret Wedding is about confusion as political strategy, shot
in a style that takes confusion and transfigures it with richness,
playfulness, and wit.

• The Nasty Girl (Das SchrecklickeMädchen). Some
enterprising arthouse should put this on a double
bill with Agresti's film. Like Secret Wedding, Michael
Verhoeven's political mockumentary
asks the question "What is truth?", then answers it with a learned,
wittily despairing shrug. Ex-schoolgirl Sonja (Lena Stolze) wants to turn her prize-winning essay on
"My Hometown During the Third Reich" into a grown-up, lid-blowing
dissertation. She meets– surprise –
closed doors and padlocked lips. In Argentina the innocent disappear; in
post-Nazi Germany the guilty disappear (while talking to you).

If directed by one of Germany's
lumpen-polemicists, such as Reinhard (Stammheim) Hauff, this
could have been a toe-crushing docudrama. Under the charge of Verhoeven – it was his tantrum-causing OK that
sent an entire Berlin festival home prizeless – all
is wit and rudeness. Small-town pomp is pilloried with black-and-white
photomontage settings, as full-color characters debate before back-projected
cathedrals, libraries, and town squares.

The style is neo-Brechtian, with speeches spoken straight to the audience,
plot information given in pedagogic collages, and cartoonlike
characters. Like Kluge and Syberberg,
Verhoeven combines drama with lantern-slide
lecture. But more than they, he gives the mixture a populist vitality.

The young Berlin audience
cheered the movie to the roof – not just because it said
"unpalatable" things about guilt-concealing Germany, but because it
said them in such a palatably un-selfrighteous way.

Political censorship, though, can have a
handicapping effect long after its official interdicts have been lifted.
Eastern Europe has the motive and opportunity to make free cinema today but
not the means, financial or imaginative. In the USSR especially, decades of
"yes sir, no sir" moviemaking – and exile or prison for anyone
doing differently – means the country approaches free expression like an
athlete running his first 100-meter race after 50 years in traction. AleksandrRogoschkin'sThe Guard(Karaul),
shown in competition, is a stiff-jointed yarn about mutiny-in-the-ranks
on a convict transport train. Allegory of Russia under perestroika? It's too rheumatically told and smudgily
photographed to be sure.

Russia's showpiece outside the
competition was Prischwin's
Paper Eyes, an
ambitious illusion/reality romp, 2 ˝ hours long and seeming not a day
shorter. A documentary filmmaker is acting in a movie about Stalin while
researching his own small-screen special about disappeared Soviet TV
veterans. Decades ellide; fiction mixes freely with
archive footage; rugs are pulled from under feet. But structurally it's such
a mess you're yelling "Help! Stop!" long before director ValeriOgorodnikov has started
on the home strait towards his message.

The best Eastern Bloc stuff
hailed from just over the Wall. You'd swear fest director de Hadeln and Ulrich Gregor, Young Filmmakers
Forum chief, stood under the Brandenburg
Gate each morning catching the latest cans of celluloid as they were
lobbed over. To be sure, "the latest" included East German movies
newly unvaulted from the mid-Sixties: films on the
order of Frank Beyer's Traces of the Stones(Spur der Steine) and Gerhard Klein's Berlin Through My Eyes(Berlin um die Ecke), that
were begun in the false dawn of Khrushchev – bandying free-thinking views on
union rights, sex, and Marxist inefficiency – but quickly aborted under
Brezhnev. There were also documentaries of last year's October uprisings –
e.g., Thomas Fricke's Ten Days in
October, Thomas Eichberg'sDresden New Beginning 89 – whose makers boldly gambled on whether
they'd end up looking down the rosy path of freedom or the barrel of a
Kalashnikov.

In a year like 1990,
"Human Beings Rally Against the System" is bound to be the shingle
hanging over the competition. It certainly hung above the U.S. movies, from Music
Box to Born on the Fourth of July, from Shadow Makers (Euro-retitle for Fat Man and Little Boy) to Driving
Miss Daisy, with its Oscar-gobbling tale of détente between two Deep
South never-the-twainers.

The "Us vs. Them" theme was everywhere among
this year's Golden Bear contenders. From Canada, Michel Brault'sPaper Wedding(Les Noces de Papier) has Genevičve Bujold
holding her country's immigration law upside down and shaking it till the
small-change lunacies fall from its pockets. She agrees to a marriage of formality
with a nationality-seeking Chilean, but then we get the made-for-TV irony:
she falls in love with him. In Xie Fin's Black
Snow(Ben MongNoan),
from China, an ex-con tries to hack out a new life in the compassionless
Peking streets, as the skies grow dark over Tiananmen Square. And JiřıَMenzel's
20-year-old anti-Communist comedy Lark on
a Wire(Skřivácina Nitıَce), now unbanned by the Czechs, gives mirror flashes for freedom
in its story of shipyard-working "bourgeois" prisoners taking the mickey out of Marx and management.

Just
about the only apolitical movie in Berlin was from that unreconstructed
hedonist Pedro Almodóvar. Apolitical? Well, that
may have been the idea. In practice, Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down(ˇAtame!)
could have been subtitled "Women's Libbers on the Verge of a Nervous
Breakdown." Boos and jeers from shocked feminists greeted this tale of a
luscious film star (Victoria Abril) kidnapped by a
gentle maniac (Antonio Banderas) and
held under house arrest until she agrees to fall in love with him. Can she?
Should she? Will she?

Yes to almost everything. First
we get 90 minutes of popsicle-hued farce-cum-suspense. Then we get a payoff
so inventively ludicrous that only a hairshirt
gender-war ideologue could complain. (Unfortunately there are plenty of these
in Berlin.)

The film is more self-spoofing
than sexist. It sprays aerosol jokes at everything in sight: the movie
industry (Francisco Rabal as a wheelchaired
Spanish Stroheim), the drugs market (subplot
involving an amphetamine-peddling lady biker), the teasy
eroticism of TV commercials. Who could believe Almodóvar
is spouting earnest pro-male messages when the movie's funniest and sexiest
scene depicts the mutual ecstasy of a lady in a bathtub and a clockwork toy
frogman? (Perhaps we should charge the director with toyism.)

ˇAtame!
was too frivolous to win any prizes, of course. The Berlin jury led the
Golden Bear into the final-day press conference and announced that, as so
often, the beast was to be rent in twain. Costa-Gavras'
Music Box took one half of the animal; Menzel'sLark on a Wire, the other. The Silver Bear, fearing similar bisection,
started to run screaming from the room, but was brought back with assurances
he wouldn't be divided in two. Instead he was divided into eight (rough
count) – among them a Best Director prize (Verhoeven),
two "outstanding single achievements" (Black Snow, Coming Out), and
three Best Actors (Daisy's Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman, plus lain
Glen in Britain's Silent Scream).

Maybe Berlin is already nostalgic
for partition and is eager to divide up anything it sees – animal, vegetable,
or mineral. Its strength as a festival has always been its abundance of
mutually competitive sections, including a Young Forum, a New German Cinema
sidebar, a Retrospective (this year on "1945" and the festival's
own history), and a Panorama (anything de Hadeln
can't squeeze into the Competition).

Nonetheless, 1990 may be looked
back on as the year of irrevocable change. In a time when the Cold War is
defrosting so fast that warm puddles of glasnost lie about the Berlin
streets, the Filmfestspiele may
have said goodbye to the blizzards of controversy that enlivened its past two
decades. What the fest will
be without its demos, stink bombs, East-West tensions, and walkouts, only
history will tell.

As I write, an entire stretch
of the Berlin Wall, from the Reichstag
to Checkpoint Charlie, is being razed by the East Germans – to the
dismay of the so-called "wallpeckers"
who've been chipping off salable bits for months. "No man's land"
itself is to become a ring road (so a Vopo, head poking through wall, told me) on
which East German Trabant's will soon be racing Mercs and Porsches. (Go Trabbi go.. Sounds good for
humanity – and automobiles. Let's hope it's good for the festival.